Performing What-If Analysis with Scenarios
You can model different business outcomes and evaluate different sets of forecast assumptions by defining scenarios. Use Scenario Manager to create scenarios and define the accounts to include—the entire chart of accounts, a subset of accounts, or just a single account. All accounts are in the Base scenario; you add an account to a scenario because you want the values to come from your new scenario rather from the Base scenario (or other standalone scenario).
Perform what-if analysis by creating different scenarios and changing the input values (including the forecast method) for different accounts in the scenario. Then, see how these changes affect the output in the account.
All models include two scenarios by default:
- Base—Includes all accounts and contains the original inputs of each account. It does not inherit any values from any other scenarios. All inherited scenarios end their inheritance order with the base scenario, or another standalone scenario; Base is always the ultimate source of data if no other scenario supplies it.
- Actuals—Contains actuals values
You can't remove the accounts from Base and Actual scenarios.
About Scenario Inheritance
You can define a scenario that inherits accounts, input values, and the forecast methods from other scenarios. For any values not in the current scenario, Strategic Modeling uses values from the scenario it inherits from. You can also set up a multiple inheritance scenario, where your scenario first looks for values in the lowest level scenario in the inheritance order. For any values not in that scenario, it searches in the next scenario in the inheritance order, and so on, until it reaches a standalone scenario, such as Base. Inherited scenarios save time in data entry and let you experiment with changing values in a scenario without breaking relationships in the model. With multiple inheritance, you can mix and match the sets of changes without breaking the relationships.
Creating a New Scenario
When you define a new scenario, you create it from an existing scenario.
To define a new scenario for what-if analysis:
-
Open a model, either by checking it out or opening it as a copy.
- In the Account View, select the scenario to use as a basis for the new scenario.
When you create a new scenario, the properties and account selection are based on the currently active scenario in the model, with the exception of inheritance order.
- From the Actions menu, click Scenario Manager.
You can also right-click a cell and click Scenario Manager.
- Click New Scenario
.
- Enter a name and description for the scenario.
- Select the type of scenario to create:
- Standalone—Creates a scenario that does not inherit values from any child scenarios and includes all the accounts in the model.
- Inherits—Specifies that the current scenario inherits values and forecast methods from the Inherit From scenario or scenarios if the values do not exist in the current scenario.
- Input Only—Creates a scenario of input-only accounts that doesn't generate any output. This option is useful for scenario rollups when you want the parent to contribute data to the scenario rollup instead of getting the data from the child for the accounts specified in the input only scenario. By adding an account to the input only scenario, it is blocked from getting data from a child node during scenario rollup. For more details about using input only scenarios in scenario rollups, see About Using Input Only Scenarios in Scenario Rollups.
- If you selected Inherits, select the scenario or scenarios from which this scenario should inherit values and forecast methods.
If you select multiple scenarios, drag and drop the scenarios to indicate the inheritance order. Note that inheritance order doesn't matter if the values from the inheriting scenarios don't overlap.
- For Use Actuals, select when to use actuals values:
- Never
- When Available—If there's an actual value for this period, use it.
- In History—Use actual values in historical periods.
For example, your budget stays static, so you would select In History for a budget scenario. But for actuals, you would want to select When Available to use the actual values as they become available over time.
- In Accounts, click Add to select the accounts to include in this scenario, select the accounts, and then click Add.
You can filter the list of accounts by using the Search box. Use Ctrl-click to select more than one account.
- Click Apply.
The scenario is added to the model.
After creating a scenario, update values or forecast methods as needed and then calculate the model.
Managing Scenarios
You can edit or delete scenarios, filter the display of scenarios, or change the scenario order.To delete a scenario, click the scenario and then click Delete 
.
To filter the scenario display (by default, all scenarios are displayed), click All Scenarios, and then select the scenarios to display: Inheriting Scenarios, Standalone Scenarios, Input Only Scenarios, Output Only Scenarios (from currency translations).
To change the order of scenarios in the Scenario Manager panel, drag and drop the scenarios to reposition them in the list. You can reorder scenarios only when All Scenarios are displayed. The Base and Actual scenarios can't be re-ordered and are always the first and second scenarios in the list. Changing the order of scenarios affects the order of scenarios in the Scenario list in the POV in Account View.
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